


little knives

by looselipssinksubs



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Canon-Typical Violence, Daydreaming, F/M, Gen, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-15
Updated: 2018-08-15
Packaged: 2019-06-27 16:10:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15688863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/looselipssinksubs/pseuds/looselipssinksubs
Summary: Her mother had not protected her. Her attendants, decorating her now like a statue before a festival, would be shocked, distressed, were she to repeat word for word what her first fiancé had said with a grin.(Before her second wedding, Irene sits, remembering.)





	little knives

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Zeebie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zeebie/gifts).



> CONTENT NOTE: Irene is betrothed at a young age to her first husband, so this fic contains discussion of child marriage, virginity, and societal expectations of women.
> 
> Many thanks to [westwind](https://archiveofourown.org/users/westwind/pseuds/westwind) for beta-reading.

“Your lady mother,” says Phresine on the day, “would be very proud.”

Irene gives her one of those looks that she is so very good at. Phresine drops the subject. The rest of the attendants exchange significant glances behind the queen’s back (after first checking that she cannot see them in the mirror). Noted: the queen’s mother is not an acceptable topic of conversation. 

What Irene cannot say— what she might bring herself to say to Eugenides, one day— is that she has heard the sentiment only once, secondhand, and not from her mother. 

The first time one of her barons had fallen to his knees before her, and the assembled court in the throne room had held its collective breath— when she had looked in his pleading eyes and dispassionately ordered his slow death— her captain of the guard had said, very softly, “Attagirl.”

(She hadn’t been meant to hear, of course, but Relius had been standing right beside him.)

For the first few years afterwards, whenever Teleus had held out his hand to help her down from her horse, she had inevitably thought of the thick scar on Euryalus’s right thumb.

She likes Teleus. Euryalus had not been, by any stretch of the imagination, likable. Some days she curses the memory of Euryalus, whenever she conjures him in the corner of her eye, whenever she is about to pardon someone and thinks better of it. When she had wavered, he’d always come down in favor of execution.

He would have come up with an easier way to get rid of the Mede. He would have arranged a non-fatal but serious head injury, with just enough plausible deniability. He wouldn’t have let the Thief of Eddis— well. Teleus wouldn’t have either, except he did.

She has been surrounded by hard-hearted, violent men for a long time, her own supporters included, her first two supporters most of all. Some days, she wants Euryalus back so badly that her stomach aches and the ache climbs into her throat. Relius is still here and that will have to be enough.

This is what she is thinking about when Phresine brings up her mother. 

Her aunts— exiled since then— had given her all kinds of advice, much of it repulsive, and ultimately boiling down to letting her fiancé have his way in all things, for she would have to set an example for the women of the court, and obedience was the highest virtue in a wife.

Her mother had not contradicted them. Her mother had not protected her.

And what, precisely, should she have done? Handed Irene the first of her little knives? Counseled her to throw the country into civil war? How could she have known she was sending her daughter into the household of a monster? What power did she have to protect herself, much less Irene?

Right now, Irene doesn’t want to think reasonably. She wants to be angry. She has seen the royal Eddisian aunts, the cousins, Eugenides’s sisters, all laughing and chatting and falling silent when she looks at them. 

She’d taken their funny, obnoxious, beloved baby brother and maimed him, turned him silent and despairing. She’s lucky they do no more than glare. Her debt to Helen grows and grows every day.

Phresine and Rhea and Althea are doing her hair, now. It will be more complex than her usual style; Irene has never felt more like a giant doll. Fingertips weave in and out. She closes her eyes to avoid the mirror.

All her guards have the same pattern of sword calluses; she has grown so accustomed to taking their hands— getting off of horses, climbing the steep hunting lodge stairs— that it is as natural to her now as allowing Phresine to touch her neck and her ears and her hair. Phresine’s hands do not remind Irene of her nurse doing up the clasp of her necklace, nor yet of her mother, so why should anyone else’s hands remind her of anything? And indeed on most days she doesn’t notice the lack of scars on anyone’s thumbs. 

The first year of her reign, she had had a fantasy, indulged very rarely and soon ruthlessly suppressed.

They live in a house, out in the middle of nowhere, like that one place she stopped at once when it snowed unexpectedly. The same dishes with red flowers, the same frayed edges on the rug. She has two attendants in the rooms beside her, not the same ones, just two abstract women necessary for propriety and for doing up her necklace. On the other side of the house are Relius and Euryalus. They all eat breakfast together and then do farm things. (She hadn’t been too clear on farm things, then.) Relius does the household accounts at the scrubbed wooden table which someone else besides Irene has scrubbed. They have an enjoyable argument about whether to sell one of the cows while Euryalus cleans mushrooms behind Relius, rolling his eyes at them. The mushrooms are from the prior day’s walk in the forest, because certainly they must have a little woods out back, just for taking walks with wicker baskets.

If this was not enough to get her to sleep, the fantasy would progress to evening. A robber comes, she kills him with a kitchen knife while Relius and Euryalus are still getting their swords, the neighbors up the road (who wear the faces of her barons) look alarmed when they see the body taken away.

Now that she thinks of it, she’s not sure why the robber never had the face of her fiancé or his father or the man Euryalus had shot or the man she’d ordered hung from the walls. Instead, he had looked like a gardener she’d disliked. 

Eugenides’s father has the same hard stare as Euryalus. So do Helen’s cousins Diana and Euphemia. It is, and isn’t, preferable to the sweetly poisonous glances of the barons’ wives.

On her wedding day— her proper wedding day, for real this time— Irene considers for the first time that her imaginary farmhouse had no room for her mother in it, nor her brother. 

What would her mother say, here in this room? Let him have his way, keep your gaze lowered, it is unbecoming to a lady of high rank to frighten her beloved, it is unbecoming—

Eugenides won’t hurt her. He will in all likelihood be clumsy and very careful. But the women about her have no reason to know that.

Last week Rhea had tentatively approached the subject— Irene had silenced her with cold scorn, to the great relief of everyone who was not looking forward to explaining what precisely goes on after weddings.

Not one of them wondered how she knew, who had told her. It had not been her mother or her aunts.

Her mother had not protected her. Her attendants, decorating her now like a statue before a festival, would be shocked, distressed, were she to repeat word for word what her first fiancé had said with a grin. They would flutter nervously and change the subject and not protect her. They don’t know Eugenides like she does; they think him a scoundrel. They make no effort to protect her. (How could they? The Eddisians are everywhere.)

Euryalus had made her practice what to do if the poison failed. Don’t bother figuring out which ribs and what angle— just get his throat. Don’t wait for an opportune moment. Don’t worry about aiming, you can’t go wrong if you just give a good push, you’re not afraid of a little blood of course.

It might sting a little, her mother had murmured, obscurely.

Eugenides trembles when she touches his cheek. Did his brothers ever warn him about whatever it is that men worry about? Does he realize that he can tell Helen, no, I can’t go through with this, and she will protect him without question?

Helen has warmly laughing aunts who talk freely and don’t mind that she wears trousers. No one has ever dreamed of telling Helen to grit her teeth and close her eyes. 

What was Irene’s mother supposed to do, give her a knife or something?

Irene’s mother died a month before the coronation. Pneumonia, though Irene had methodically searched the scientific library for evidence of poison. She sent away the pious aunts the moment she could. Relius hadn’t pressed her for their execution.

Perhaps if Eugenides has to make an effort to get her hair loose, he’ll be smiling and relaxed by the time he’s found every last pin. You can’t be afraid of someone in a nightshirt with disordered hair, can you? Irene reaches into her hair and yanks out a jewel on a coiled wire. It pulls the rest of the small braid awry. “Redo this,” she says. “I don’t want it slipping out.”

Helen has plenty of aunts, cousins, affection on all sides.

Irene has men with swords and guns.

“If you’re finished,” she tells Phresine without opening her eyes, “let’s go.”

**Author's Note:**

> Dear Zeebie— this was a lot angstier than your prompt about Irene’s mother was probably intended to be, but I hope you like it anyway! I only regret that I could not do justice to your other prompt that said simply “Y E E T.”


End file.
